As a producer with limited music-theory skills, but overflowing with ideas, I’ve often found my voice to be the most effective ways to get creative ideas “on paper”. This method has it’s restrictions, however, as I usually end up having to re-create my recorded vocal melody as MIDI, which can be cumbersome and slow.

Enter imitone. The device I’ve always wanted, but could never really find. Controlling synths and samplers with your voice seems like a neat trick at first glance, but actually using imitone in the context of making music is a joy and something I might soon find indispensable to my workflow.

Implementation is simple. Open up the stand-alone imitone application (you do have a mic set up, right?), open your MIDI-capable DAW of choice, point imitone at the instrument you wish to control, and start making noises with your face.

The application runs very efficiently, even on older computers, and has features such as pitch stabilization, scale definition, and multi-input functionality (imitone Prime only). I should also mention that it does a fantastic job of registering pitch bend, but some tweaking of your synth and sampler patches might be required to get the exact behavior you want. Beyond pitch bend detection, you can send vibrato and expression data (by fluctuating your pitch and volume) to further control synth and sampler patches that are configured to accept CCs 1 and 7.

If this application sounds intriguing to you, I highly suggest that you make your way over to imitone.com and look into pre-ordering a license, which gives you immediate access to the beta version.

imitone is developed by Evan Balster at Interactopia LLC , and is can be pre-ordered for $25 or $60 for imitone Prime with advanced features.